Home |
Search |
Today's Posts |
|
Metalworking (rec.crafts.metalworking) Discuss various aspects of working with metal, such as machining, welding, metal joining, screwing, casting, hardening/tempering, blacksmithing/forging, spinning and hammer work, sheet metal work. |
|
LinkBack | Thread Tools | Display Modes |
#1
Posted to rec.crafts.metalworking
|
|||
|
|||
Nothing Special, but It Still Made Me Smile - Turning
As some of you might be aware I tore down a washing machine over the weekend
to see what I could salvage. For personal projects I am always stingy about material. It just irks me to spend $20 for a piece of metal to make a $10 tool. Anyway except for the sheet metal there isn't much useable metal in this thing. The biggest piece after the very light gage stainless steel basket is a piece of cast aluminum that support the basket and had a steel shaft cast into it for the bearings it spins on. At first I was going to pitch it, I kept looking at that steel shaft. Its a nice hunk of metal to go in my useable scraps bucket. The problem was this huge piece of badly oxidized cast aluminum wrapped around it. I set it in the little 12 ton press and decided to see if I could press the shaft out of the aluminum. Will I managed to shatter the aluminum casting down into a smaller more manageable nasty lump. LOL. For anybody who is curious I was right at the limit of the 12ton, and was considering moving it over to the 20 ton when it gave way. After that I was able to cut the aluminum down to a more manageable nasty lump with the bandsaw. Still there was a big nasty lump of oxidized and dirty cast aluminum around the end of the shaft. I had made such progress I hated to give up or just cut the steel off at the edge of the casting, so I chucked it up in the PM14x40 lathe and started doing some very interrupted turning with a hand ground HSS bit. It worked beautifully. I ramped up the speed to 750, and started taking off upto 0.150 at a time and it just sailed through it. I could hear the impact, but even with my hand resting on the head of the lathe I didn't feel the vibration you might expect. I got right down to the steel core with just a very thin film of aluminum still on the the steel shaft. It just made me smile to salvage that piece of steel almost effortlessly with the PM lathe. As a side note: The aluminum was very definitely cast around the piece of steel is it filled some keying flats milled into the side of the shaft. Those did a fantastic job of locking the two pieces together, but what surprised me is how tenacious the aluminum stuck to the surface of the steel in general. Right down to the point where I can see the steel through the aluminum all the way around and the aluminum didn't flake away from the steel in a single spot. I wonder how they got that bond. If just the heat was enough or if they used some kind of flux on the steel before casting the aluminum around it. Someday that piece of steel (seemed to be pretty soft) is going to get use for some project and I'll be glad I wasted all those electrons salvaging it. Now to salvage the bearings. |
Thread Tools | Search this Thread |
Display Modes | |
|
|